Official

2002 is over, many games sites are throwing out the same old "games of the year feature"... NOT US! Being a mod site that just would not be our style, however seeing as we don't want to miss out on the action, we are doing a MASSIVE feature on the best mods of 2002!

After two months of accepting nonimations, bribes and attempting to ignore the crazy DBZ fans whose vote generally reads "our mod is teh b0mb - 1337 yeah!" we have choosen the best mods across the following categories *drum roll*:

The Mod DB team has been working around the clock to get the 2007 Mod of the Year Awards running and finally they are just around the corner! In a few days at the end of December they shall kick off and players choice voting shall begin.

But before we fight over the best mods of 2007 and debate endlessly if it was a good year of modding, its time to take a look back at the past 5 years of MOTY, an event which began as a humble forum thread and has now grown into a closely fought and coveted event.

Actually I believe that almost makes it harder to win, since there are 500 mods all fighting for the same attention / votes. We saw that in the 2006 competition where HL2 dominated the top 100, but because people could only choose their top 3 and there were so many HL2 mods, BF2 dominated this stage and ended up cleaning up the prizes.

So is it now nailed what the new categories will be or is this still a run in the dark so far? Maybe we should ( in awareness of the source community ) make maybe a non-source mod award? This would especially give out-of-the-box mods a better chance to get some real exposure and recognition for their work.

Btw... how many of the winner mods are still kicking nowadays? Would be interesting to see what lasted and what not.

There are better ways to organise it. As I've suggested in the past, giving awards by genre instead of by engine would compare similar mods against eachother. However, certain engines are better equipped for certain genres. Therefore awarding by genre would help non-Source mods get recognition for their achievements. Obviously Source would be a strong favourite for the FPS mods, but I doubt it would do so well in RPG/Adventure/Driving/Flight Sim, to give a few examples.

The main question here is how to organise genres. We saw last year that 'Afraid of Monsters' for HL won 'Adventure'. I would say that it's a Horror FPS game, but not an adventure game.

For instance, this article En.wikipedia.org
claims that the Adventure genre in its purest form is completely devoid of action, instead focusing on other things like puzzle-solving and character involvement. Even the Action-Adventure definition would rule out Afraid of Monsters:

"Action-adventure games focus on exploration and usually involve item gathering, simple puzzle solving, and combat."

So the question is really about how the genres are divided up. But this system does need to be dynamic and relate back to the year in question. E.g. if there were 5 Tactical Shooters and 4 First-Person Shooters released in the same year and they were all of a good standard, it would make sense to divide up the 'shooter' awards into 2 sub-genre awards. This will most likely be the case this year, since shooters are so popular.

I would also definitely divide up single-player and multiplayer awards, because not everyone craves one or the other equally.